For example, a 2021 online poll by The Harris Poll on behalf of NortonLifeLock found that “Nearly one in 10 adults who have been in a romantic relationship used an app to monitor a romantic partner’s device activity.” Likewise, governments and law enforcement have argued that commercial spyware can have legitimate uses for tracking suspected terrorists and criminals. These umbrella terms refer to spyware applications that someone installs on someone else’s device, with or without the other person’s consent or knowledge, to track the activity of the person who uses the device. Commercial spyware is sometimes called 'stalkerware' or 'surveillanceware'. To understand mercenary spyware, we should first describe its place within the commercial spyware industry. Understanding will help them field questions from employees about security best practices and whether or not they should enable this new feature. IT and security teams should familiarize themselves with Lockdown Mode and the broader commercial and mercenary spyware threat. This mode provides enhanced security for individuals at the tradeoff of removing or greatly stripping down many functionalities within the various Apple operating systems. To counteract the risk from mercenary spyware, Apple released a new security protection mode named “Lockdown Mode” in September 2022 as part of the release of iOS 16 (it will be available for iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura when Apple releases those in October 2022).

According to Malwarebytes’ 2022 Threat Review, the vast majority of malware detections on Apple platforms are-in most cases-fairly harmless however, the growth of mercenary spyware places specific, targeted individuals within key industries at risk. Although Apple designs security into its hardware, software, and services, Apple devices are not immune to malware and unwanted software installation.

How to detect spyware on a mac